Rule Of Law Making A Comeback?

I don't know if this is a trend or not, but when I read this:

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued an extremely rare order that the case of Canadian rendition victim Maher Arar would be heard en banc by all of the active judges on the Second Circuit on December 9, 2008. For the court to issue the order sua sponte, that is, of its own accord without either party submitting papers requesting a rehearing, is even more rare.

"We are very encouraged," said CCR attorney Maria LaHood. "For the court to take such extraordinary action on its own indicates the importance the judges place on the case and means that Maher may finally see justice in this country. As the dissenting judge noted, the majority’s opinion gave federal officials the license to 'violate constitutional rights with virtual impunity.' Now the court has the opportunity to uphold the law and hold accountable the U.S. officials who sent Maher to be tortured."...

After nearly two weeks in New York, with access to counsel and the court obstructed, he was flown to Jordan on a chartered jet in the middle of the night and taken by land to Syria. Mr. Arar was tortured, interrogated and kept in a 3x6x7-foot underground cell for a year until the Syrian government, finding no connections to terrorism, released him home to Canada.

...followed by this:

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and embattled former White House liaison Monica Goodling are among those newly named as defendants in a private class-action lawsuit against the DOJ.

The suit, Gerlich et al. v. Department of Justice, was orginally filed in response to the Inspector General's report on politicized hiring in the Attorney General's Honors Program. The report found that a number of DOJ officials, namely Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, had broken the law in basing hiring decisions based on political affiliations.

...and then topped off with this:

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic [...]

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas. Legal experts have questioned whether contractors working for the State Department can be prosecuted under its provisions.

It just kind of makes me think that somebody, somewhere, has said "enough," or maybe a collection of folks said it, and decided to reassert the laws of the country instead of allowing executive and corporate power to run rampant.

That'd be nice...

Dispatches On The War On Torture

Some hits and misses from the courts yesterday. First, Maher Arar, who was stopped at JFK Airprort, rendered to Syria and tortured, had his case dismissed yesterday on the grounds that he technically never set foot on US soil and thus his claims cannot be heard in federal court.

That's a little unbelievable.

On a somewhat brighter side, a court took a look at the evidence in a habeas suit for a prisoner at Guantanamo, and found it so wanting that he quoted Lewis Carroll:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Well, yes, that's worked for them so far, so why wouldn't they continue. We're going to see this over and over in these habeas suits. The government doesn't have the goods to charge these people, and if they did, they would have done so by now.

Sensing this problem, yesterday the government charged a prisoner at Gitmo with the USS Cole bombing, almost completely out of the blue. And this was a prisoner who was subject to waterboarding.

Pentagon officials announced eight charges against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent. He has been in U.S. custody since late 2002, and is one of three detainees the government has acknowledged subjecting to an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

Nashiri's "waterboarding" at the hands of CIA interrogators -- a technique that human rights groups around the world have condemned as torture -- figures to be a central element of his case. Defense attorneys immediately vowed to challenge any evidence obtained by coercion and criticized the Pentagon for moving forward with the military trial despite officials' awareness of how Nashiri was treated [...]

Nashiri contended at a military hearing last year that he confessed to masterminding the Cole attack only because he had been tortured, according to a transcript of that hearing.

As Marcy Wheeler notes, this should be an interesting trial because Nashiri is the only one of the three waterboarded prisoners who will challenge his captors in court.

And other former prisoners are challenging their captors in court - only this time, it's their corporate contractors.

Four Iraqi men say they are suing US military contractors for torturing them while they were detained at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

The men, who were all released without charge, have brought separate lawsuits in four US courts.

One of the men said he was beaten, threatened with dogs and given electric shocks during four years at the prison.

I wonder if this will be thrown out too, because they never "set foot" on US soil.

World Report

• This Zimbabwean election is poised to end in violence and tragedy. The runoff between ruler Robert Mugabe and challenger Morgan Tsvangirai is set for later in the month. And already Tsvangirai has been arrested and detained before being set free, and US and British diplomats have also been detained. They're trying to suspend all NGO work in the country under the suspicion that aid workers are undermining the ruling party. This kind of paranoia combined with brute force never ends well.

• Speaking of fearful dictators, in Burma the military junta has rejected the aid of US Navy ships, leaving up to a million people still without adequate food or water in the wake of the cyclone. Meanwhile, the country has gone so far as to detain an activist comedian named "The Tweezers" for the crime of trying to help out cyclone victims. That's a humanitarian disaster beyond all reason, and a telling reminder of the tragic intersection between natural disasters and despotic governments.

• Here's a nice interview with the world's most notorious nuclear proliferator - A.Q. Khan, under the scourge of house arrest at his elaborate villa in Pakistan. He claims in the interview that he was doing the bidding of Pakistan by selling nuclear secrets to the likes of Libya and North Korea. That just shows the stupidity of trying to work with Pervez Musharraf, the head of the government during Khan's selling spree.

• I've been sitting on this one for a couple weeks, but haven't had the time to go into it. Basically, the British have been laundering money through a weapons maker called BAE and creating a giant off-the-books slush fund that has been used to finance covert ops with Britain and the United States in the lead. The Saudis were at the head of this, through former US Ambassador Prince Bandar. It's looking pretty clear that these bribes from the Saudis to BAE funded covert ops. The story is labyrinthine, but Marcy Wheeler's on it.

• There may be nothing sadder than the plight of the Baghdad Jews. This is a sect that has direct roots back to Abraham, and in the strife of the Iraq occupation they've been almost completely wiped out.

• Maher Arar was a Canadian citizen who US officials detained after 9/11 and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured. Now the Justice Department is investigating the incident, but I hold little hope that they will reach any actionable conclusion. What's sad is how stories like Arar's are NOT the exception. Also sad is the number of investigations that this branch of the DoJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility, has on their plate.

• And the story of the day is the retelling of how the Defense Department was duped by Iranian intelligence into advancing the cause of exiles, which led to the Iraq war.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The proper response to unbelievable misconduct of this kind is to stop any investigation into it.

You should read the whole sordid story. It involves neocon crackpot Michael Ledeen, an old Iran-Contra hand named Manucher Ghorbanifar, and basically a bunch of idiots at the Pentagon taking these stories at face value. The stories that have come out JUST THIS WEEK about the war are enough grounds for impeachment.
•

Shit And Fan Coming Together At The State Department

We've had our first post-Blackwater resignation, from the top security chief.

The State Department's security chief announced his resignation on Wednesday in the wake of last month's deadly Blackwater USA shooting incident in Baghdad and growing questions about the use of private contractors in Iraq.

Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, announced his decision to resign at a weekly staff meeting, according to an internal informational e-mail sent to colleagues.

It's obviously going to get much worse for the State Department, as Iraq has formally removed the cloak of immunity protecting private military contractors from prosecution for their actions. This was a holdover from the Coalition Provisional Authority days, and now it's no longer operative. As a result, the contractors could leave whether or not State wants them to stay.

Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association -- otherwise known as the private-security lobby -- took a cautious approach, saying he wanted to reserve judgment until the State Department and the Pentagon made its views known. But he pointed out that most contractors -- not just security contractors, but contractors involved in reconstruction, as well -- hire Iraqis to do significant amounts of grunt work, which westerners supervise. "If you say anyone not Iraqi is now under Iraqi law -- such as it is -- you'll lose a lot of oversight and management capabilities," Brooks says. That's because he expects his member organizations on the ground in Iraq to either shed their American staff or experience difficulty recruiting Americans to go to Iraq in the future. "It would be enormously risky to stay. Individual contractors would have to take a hard look" at remaining in Iraq.

The State Department has claimed that there's no alternative to using private military contractors to guard diplomats. Not only is that a crock of shit, it's about to be tested. Because Blackwater isn't going to expose themselves to prosecution.

Meanwhile, Blackwater is reduced to sending out emails to supporters begging them to astroturf the Congress:

The Blackwater family is comprised of dedicated and active service providers that work vigorously to support the American nation. In this tumultuous political climate, Blackwater Worldwide has taken center stage, our services and ethics aggressively challenged with misinformation and fabrications. Letters, e-mails and calls to your elected Congressional representatives can and will create a positive impact by influencing the manner in which they gather and present information.

While we can’t ask that each supporter do everything, Blackwater asks that everyone does something. Contact your lawmakers and tell them to stand by the truth. Correspondence should be polite and professional. We don’t support generating negative messages. Tell the Blackwater story and encourage your representatives to seek the truth instead of reading negative propaganda and drawing the wrong conclusions.

Suggested themes:
- Cost efficiency of Blackwater – saving the US taxpayer millions of dollars so that the US Government doesn’t have to take troops from their missions or send more into harms way
- Professional population of service veterans and mature law enforcement personnel
- Sacrifice in lives lost by Blackwater saving US diplomats without one single protectee harmed

Sad and hilarious.

UPDATE: Condi Rice does not recall.

Rice did not apologize in the hearing and avoided directly answering a question from Massachusetts Democrat Rep. William Delahunt who asked if she knew (Maher) Arar was tortured in Syria.

"You are aware of the fact that he was tortured?" Delahunt asked.

"I am aware of claims that were made," she responded.

But when asked if the United States had received any diplomatic assurances from Syria that Arar would not be tortured, Rice said her memory of the events had faded and she would have to respond later to the question.

Is the State Department MORE embarrassing than the Justice Department, or less? Discuss.